Best of Portland 2014: Best Moves

February’s snowpocalypse brought an especially giddy form of chaos to Portland.

Sure, the snow and
ice forced the cancellation of some events—notably, the Polar Plunge and
the Worst Day of the Year Ride, both predicated on bad weather that
wasn’t expected to actually come. But it also allowed something far more
rare and precious: the Stumptown Birkebeiner (stumptownbirkebeiner.org), a cross-country ski race through downtown that happened for the first time in six years on Feb. 7.

“I had been away the
previous weekend,” says race organizer Win Goodbody. “When I came back
and saw how much it was supposed to snow, I thought, ‘Oh, my God. It’s
happening.’”

Goodbody had one day
to pull the race together. He created a website detailing the game plan:
Skiers would meet at Powell’s City of Books at 9 am and ski down
snowpack-covered West Burnside Street. Word got out, and dozens of
people showed up, some in hot-pink and cow-print ski suits, some holding
Scandinavian flags, some wearing traditional Nordic garb. They spent
the day racing through the white streets, from Northwest 23rd Avenue and
Johnson Street to Southwest Montgomery Street, making a pit stop at the
Salt & Straw. The next day, they did it all over again—this time
adding a few sprint ski races at Wallace Park. “On Northwest Johnson,
you could look behind you and see skiers stretching all the way from
REI,” says Goodbody. “It was awesome.”

The only other time
this happened was in 2008, when Goodbody commemorated this tradition
with seven or eight others. As for the next Stumptown Birkebeiner? Don’t
get your skis waxed, it might be a few years.KATHERINE MARRONE.

BEST0.9 SECONDS

As told by those who watched Damian Lillard’s shot fall on May 3, 2014.

Brian Wheeler, Trail Blazers radio play-by-play
announcer: “Point-nine remaining. 98-96 Houston. How ’bout a 3-pointer
to win it and end all the suspense?… This would be an awfully tough way
to lose this game. Terry Stotts telling his team to come on over; Mo
Williams talking to [referee] Bill Kennedy. That’s not going to help
anything now. It’s 98-96 Houston, as Chandler Parsons’ first two points
of the second half end up being potentially the biggest of the entire
game, unless the Blazers can have an answer here in the final 0.9 of
regulation.… The Blazers have one 3-pointer in the quarter, that was by
Batum. But Nic’s gonna inbound; I don’t know if there’s enough time for
him to get it back. This time they put Jones on Batum, and Howard is
defending Aldridge so in case the Blazers go for a two to their best
player, Howard is defending it. Batum throws to Lillard, a three for the
game…BAAAAAAAAAAAANNNG!”

Joe Swide, Portland Roundball Society: “Of course I
remember where I was: in Los Angeles, running through the house of my
very Lebanese and very not-a-basketball-fan aunt, screaming who knows
what about the fine city of Portland. I’ll remember that forever, and I
couldn’t care less that the Blazers lost in the next round. Moments like
that shouldn’t be retroactively contextualized. Let them feel how they
felt. When the shot dropped and the running and screaming commenced, no
one in that moment was thinking about the future, and the best part, no
one was thinking about the past.”

Matthew Korfhage, WW staff writer: “I wasn’t
watching the game; I was walking down the street. First there was a
tense guttural sound from six different houses, and then six different
houses erupted in wild cheers. They couldn’t hear each other in the
different houses—they didn’t even know the other people existed—but from
where I stood they were all cheering together. It was terrific. But if I
didn’t already know what was happening it would have scared the hell
out of me.”

Casey Jarman, managing editor of The Believer,
who was in the Moda Center: “It felt like hitting the water after the
highest high-dive. No one would leave. They kept watching the replay
over and over. Hugging each other. Jumping. The longest continuous
scream I’ve ever heard, like no other sound. Outside, fans hugged each
other and chanted. Fans hugged security guards and cops, and I saw tears
in their eyes, and it felt like complete temporary insanity. I was
having trouble understanding why I cared. And then I knew why I cared.
Because in one second, 20,000 people can become linked for the rest of
their lives by watching all sorts of minor miracles—redemption of the
downtrodden, the birth of a superstar, the bite of the underdog—all snap
together. I wandered around in a daze, trying to pinpoint how I knew
this feeling of mass purpose blended with a touch of hysteria. And then I
saw myself in 1999, surrounded by people chanting and singing and
crying, walking through clouds of tear gas, in downtown Seattle. Maybe
that didn’t matter, either, I don’t know. But those stories of where you
were come to define you. That shot entered the five-minute montage of
what defines Portland, and I was happy to be there.” AARON MESH.

BEST BEATDOWN

In high school, Emily Corso got her varsity letter as a member of the speech and debate club. Now she’s a professional cage fighter.

Corso, a petite
26-year-old with shoulder-length blond hair and chipped coral nail
polish, picked up mixed martial arts as a freshman at Reed College.
Non-athletic and out of shape—she took a swing dance class for P.E.
credit—she enrolled in a self-defense course.

EMILY CORSO

IMAGE: Ernie Sapiro

The first night of
her class, she caught the eye of the coach. “I was hanging onto another
girl’s back like a koala,” Corso says. “The coach was yelling and
yelling, so excited that I had gotten to her back, which is one of the
better positions in jujitsu.”

The flyweight,
originally from Sitka, Alaska, went on to post a 9-1 record as an
amateur MMA fighter, and this past spring she turned pro. In May, she
traveled to Montana for her first two fights, which she won, taking home
nearly $2,000 in prize money. (She has one more pro fight scheduled
this month.) Corso says her favorite move is the rear naked choke: an
elbow-around-the-neck hold from behind, like what hostage takers do in
the movies (minus the revolver).

Her nickname in the ring? “The Mantis Shrimp,” an animal she first discovered in the Web comic The Oatmeal.

“It’s a rainbow
lobster that is incredibly murderous and destructive,” says Corso, who
initially planned to study math or science at Reed but wound up majoring
in religion. “It can see ultraviolet light, and it moves so fast it
causes cavitation bubbles that heat the water around it to the
temperature of the surface of the sun.

“It dismembers you
faster than anything can see. I like the idea of this whimsical but
dangerous creature. I feel like that’s me.”REBECCA JACOBSON.

BEST NBA ILLUSTRATOR

Basketball is often compared to jazz, but in the hands of Patrick Truby (patruby.com),
it’s more like New Wave—specifically, A-ha’s “Take On Me” video. His
animated NBA GIFs, created using a similar technique called rotoscoping,
essentially trace live footage. By stripping each play to its
essentials—the ball, the hoop, the players—Truby’s scenes capture the
game more vividly than any plasma screen.

Illustration by Patrick Truby

“I’m mostly drawing
what I see, so a lot of my lines will be based on how a player moves,”
says Truby, a copywriter for Fred Meyer by day. “James Harden moves much
more smoothly than Allen Iverson did, so my James Harden animation has
much more solid, flowing lines than the Iverson animation, which has a
lot of visual noise to it.”

A Seattle native,
Truby took an eight-year break from visual art while pursuing a creative
writing degree at Emerson College in Boston. During the labor dispute
that threatened to cancel the NBA’s 2011-12 season, he went online with
an ultimatum. “I made a joke on Twitter that if the lockout ended today,
I’ll start a blog of NBA drawings,” he says. “That was the day the
lockout ended.” His work has since appeared on Deadspin, a few official
NBA blogs and even Inside Stuff on NBA TV. He spent this year’s
playoffs illustrating highlights for Turner Sports, including Kevin
Durant’s falling-out-of-bounds 4-point play against Memphis and Vince
Carter’s buzzer-beater versus the Spurs. He moved to Portland a year
ago, and his illustration of Damian Lillard’s series-icing 3-pointer
against Houston was an instant classic.

“As soon as it
happened, I was like, ‘Oh, I need to do that,’” Truby says. “There’s no
way to really describe how big of a deal that was, and how awesome it
was.” Luckily, he didn’t need to. MATTHEW SINGER.

BEST WRESTLING CHURCH

Portland’s Wrestling Church has only a few basic
tenets. Respect the masks. Know your poison-mist varietals. Never cheer
for the Orange Goblin (that’d be Hulk Hogan). Most importantly: Don’t
stop believing.

A spinoff of Portland
Organic Wrestling, which put on live matches at Satyricon in the early
2000s, it is less an evangelical organization than an appreciation
society—or, as co-founder Jack Maraglia puts it, “a welcoming group of
men and women who love human goddamned chess.”

Every Sunday, the
congregation would meet upstairs at Billy Ray’s Tavern in Northeast
Portland, sharing footage from around the world and cheering as if the
Blazers had just won Game 7 of the NBA Finals.

After a few years of
dormancy, the church was resurrected this past Easter at Jack London Bar
downtown, with a service that included entrance music “hymnals” and a
shrine to fallen warriors. As for the sermons, there’s only one that
matters: Keep the faith, and “geek the fuck out.” “It’s still real to
us,” Maraglia says. Amen. MATTHEW SINGER.

BEST SHIPWRIGHTS

At the Wind and Oar Boat School (windandoar.org)
you won’t learn how to sail or row. They build boats here, but neither
is it a place where you’ll get lessons on building your dream yacht or
completing that rotting half-finished canoe in your garage.

The school’s motto: “It’s not about the boat.”

Instead, the mission
of school founder Peter Crim is to make a difference in the lives of
young people. Crim, who spent his Connecticut youth around wooden
sailboats, worked for years as an engineer at KPTV before launching his
own businesses.

But after a summer
taking classes at the WoodenBoat School in Maine, Crim, 63, returned
inspired to create a place where youth who have struggled with school
can see firsthand how basic skills such as math, science and design play
out in the real world. The school finds a sponsor who wants a boat
built, and the students take on the project, often skiffs or small
sailboats. Last year, though, the school launched a stunning 16-foot
gaff-rigged sloop built by 10 students, most of whom had not finished
high school.

When they finished,
Crim says, “Each one could point to a part of the boat and say, ‘I built
that.’ We’re teaching responsibility and skills, but the idea is also
to give hope.”BRENT WALTH.

BEST BUD

Mascots, as a rule, aren’t meant to inspire fans. For
every bolt of cosmic synchronicity that blesses a Timber Jim or Joey
upon a grateful crowd of devotees, there are a dozen avatars born from
marketing guidelines and rigorously focus-grouped to entertain the most
lethargic in the audience.

BARLEY

Image courtesy Hillsboro Hops

We don’t really know
much about Blaze the Trail Cat. He likes T-shirts and trampolines and,
presumably, basketball. He doesn’t seem to mind us, though we’re never
quite sure. He is, after all, a cat. He’s zoned out, chasing his own
bliss.

Even if you’re to allow that “Blaze” was named by accident, there’s no mistaking the intent behind Barley, mascot of the Hillsboro Hops.

Since supplanting
Boomer, a plushie Yakima Bear, shortly after the Class A franchise moved
to Hillsboro for the 2013 season, Barley has exploited every
opportunity to hang out and spread positive vibes.

Barley, in other words, would like to be our bud. Our kind bud.

He’s pretty
chill—active within the community, quick to speak out against bullying
and neg energy in general. And he does, we suppose, technically resemble
a shaggily flowering batch of hops. But other resemblances could also
be inferred. The only clues in his bio are banh mi cravings and a
passion for all things Nike. JAY HORTON.